The assignee ranking for this dataset runs 100 companies deep, with the leading assignee holding 31 of the 291 records in scope, compared with 9 for the fifth-placed assignee and 6 for the tenth. That means the top 10 assignees together account for 48.1% of all records, so nearly half of the field’s activity is concentrated in a small group while the remaining 90 assignees in the ranking hold only a handful of families each. Anyone assessing competitive position should look at both the steep top-5 curve and the long flat tail beneath it, since the tail is where new entrants are most likely to find room to file.

Over the last fully complete filing window, 2021 to 2024, filings rose from 4 to 5 records, a 25% increase, after peaking at 20 records in 2022. The apparent drop shown for 2025 and 2026 is an artefact of publication lag — patent applications typically take around 18 months to publish, so those years are still filling in rather than reflecting an actual decline. Judged on complete years only, the trend is one of sustained rather than falling interest.

Kitchen and cooking utensils (IPC class A47J) is the largest single category at 22.7% of the 291 records in scope, followed by laundering, drying and ironing equipment (D06F) at 16.2%, electric heating and lighting circuits (H05B) at 15.5%, and steam generation and boilers (F22B) at 14.8%. Because a single patent record can carry more than one IPC classification, these percentages add up to more than 100% and should each be read against the full 291-record total rather than against one another. Industrial-scale classes such as electrolytic production of compounds (C25B) and earth and rock drilling (E21B) carry noticeably fewer records, suggesting less crowded claim space there.